Chapter Nine: Farmer's Market

January 18, 2005

Okay, after five years and except for the first few paragraphs of each chapter, I'm taking Dead Ginny off the net. I got out of it everything I wanted to get out of it. If you want to get a copy of the final, way better book which is now called Ginny Good, like one that has a pretty cover on it that you can sit down in front of a fire in the fireplace or take to the beach or with you in the car or on a bus or a plane or a train and read like a normal human being, click this:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggsyn.html

If you want to read a bunch of reviews, click this:

http://janmag.com/biography/ginnygood.html

Or this:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/ggrev.html

If you want to see more about all the other stuff I've been up to, poke around among the pages here:

http://everyonewhosanyone.com

Thanks.

Gerard Jones
everyone@everyonewhosanyone.com

Chapter Nine

Farmer's Market

Okay. So. After our disastrous date, I kept on working at Kinney's until my gorgeous white Lincoln finally fell completely apart on the freeway and I had to get a job I could walk to. The job I got was at Kay-Bee's Toys in the Hillsdale Shopping Center. That was where I was working when Kennedy got shot. Anyone with the faculty of his or her memory intact at the time remembers what he or she was doing the day Kennedy got shot. Myself, what I was doing was I was having lunch with Ralph Wood in Farmer's Market. Farmer's Market is what they called the food court in the Hillsdale Mall. We were over by La Fiesta, the Mexican food concession. Ralph was drinking a cup of strong black coffee. I was scraping the last of a side order of shell macaroni in tomato sauce into a warm, buttered tortilla when we heard the news.
Ralph was tall and skinny and ten years older than everyone. What he did for a living was he was a thief. He looked like a bird. The bones around his temples stuck out. He cocked his head to one side when he listened. Sometimes he cocked his head to one side even when there wasn't anything to listen to, like on the off chance there might be something to listen to, like he was listening for things to listen to. He was nervous and fidgety and had bad teeth and no chin and a long, thin nose that had been broken so many times there wasn't anything left inside to break anymore. It was like Playdough—like, if you squashed his nose over to one side it would pretty much just stay there. He wore thick glasses with thick black rims which, when they got broken, as they often did, he taped back together again with black electrical tape, or, in a pinch, with flesh colored Band-Aids. And the way he slicked back his hair was the last straw. His hair was black and spiky and, no matter how hard he tried to keep it slicked back, always seemed to be trying to stick up in a ridge across the top of his scalp. He was a bird; an angry, intense, paranoid schizophrenic scavenger bird of some sort—a raven, say, or a buzzard, with watery, magnified, red-rimmed eyes that always seemed about to pop out of their sockets.

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